Now, as Quilty’s 40th birthday approaches, the married father of two has decided the time has come to put away childish things. Tonight the car he bought very second-hand even back in 1995 goes on eBay.

Most of his early profits were ploughed back into the money pit on wheels, says Quilty, who reckons he spent about $50,000 on it all up, and barely drives it once a year given its slim hips don’t stretch to booster seats.

That doesn’t include work by a panel beater friend who took an early Torana painting as payment – and flogged it five years later for $50,000 (adding insult to injury: the spray job was, Quilty says, “rubbish").

“I doubt the whole thing is worth a tenth of one of the paintings of it," he says. “But it’s a beautiful little car. I was always fascinated by the shape and the history and its significance as a piece of cultural ephemera; what it meant to guys like me."